DotNetPalm continued!

We are in the process of launching a Developer Community Portal named DotNetPalm (www.dotnetpalm.net).

At this point in time we would like to hear your feed back on look and feel and content of the portal. We will also appreciate you to join this portal and make contributions.

Launching DotNetPalm

Now DotNetPalm.net is live!

GEEK. Once They Are United There Is No Going Back!

Check out!

Come join the first Microsoft developers conference in Dubai. A two day event with new releases and previews of ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Windows Vista and Office 2007. Whether you are an amateur developer, a "code-guru" or anything in between, you need to be at the biggest developer conference in the region.

Its gonna be a super event!

See you all there!

Code Room's 3rd Episode

Today I watched 3rd episode of TheCodeRoom. Its freely available for download.

MVP Again!

I am not sure but my mom told me over the phone that they have recieved MVP kit. That means I have been selected as an MVP for the second time in as many years. If thats the case then I am really really happpy!!!!!

MVPs Rocks!

Gulf .NET Developer Community Launch Meeting

Tongight (or perhaps Yesterday night, since its 12 AM here) we had a meeting about launching a developer community for the Gulf Region.
I have posted about it earlier as well.

15 enthusiasts attended the meeting. I mailed the agenda a night before the meeting to quite a few of the individuals. We stuck to the agenda and our meeting lasted for around an hour. Now we will be doing a follow up poll on how all of want things to be moving forward. I am pretty much charged and enthusaistic about this community based initiative and i am positive about making this community a real success!



Stay tuned!

Microsoft's acquires Lionhead Studios

I was just browsing through BBC and came across this story .

Lets anticipate a new and exciting dimension to be added to Microsoft Gaming.

Now I believe Peter Molyneux will be part of Microsoft team.

Similar events have taken place in past as well. I can recall Ray Ozzies inclusion to cite here as the example.

Launching Developer Community in Dubai

I have been in touch with people from Microsoft like Vimal Sethi, Amr El Garhy and Chad Hower recently to launch a developer community in UAE, specially, Dubai.

So finally things are rolling and we are eyeing 30th April as the launch date. The community will be launched during Gulf Developer Conference (GDC 2006) event.

This community will be offering different services to different sections of developer community.

For Software developers:

This will offer one stop shop where they can discuss their technical problems in online and offline forums.

Learn new, cool and upcoming technologies through technical sessions as well as hands on labs.

Socialize with peers in industry and share their passion in Microsoft Technologies.

For Senior Developers/Architects and Project Managers:

They will be able to learn from each others experiences and share best practices for successful architecture, design, implementation and overall management of softwate projects.

They will also be able to act as speakers and lead conversations on particular topic of expertiese.

For Students:

This community will act as a group of people who could act as mentors to the students. The group will plan regular events and visits at all the universities and colleges and will try to help and guide students do their projects and computer science studies.

I will write more about the aims and purspose of the group

Smart Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit Released

Just found out on MSDN that Microsoft has released Smart Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit . Check out!

"The Smart Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit provides an integrated set of guidance to help architects and developers create smart client line-of-business applications. A smart client line-of-business application has one or more of the following characteristics:
It has a rich user interface that takes advantage of the power of the Microsoft Windows desktop.
It connects to and exchanges data with multiple back-end systems.
It takes advantage of local caching and processing to enable operation during periods of no network connectivity or intermittent network connectivity.
It is easily deployed and configured.

Smart Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit

Of DirectShow and C#

I recently recived this mail that inquired about using Direct show with C#.

Query:

I was using C# for programming I want to develop a software which handles video recording/playback /video format handling etc. Will c# support DirectShow. Will DirectShow give support for Recording if I use with C#. The program written in C# or C++ will be better. I want the program in managed code. Help me pls to select the apt language pls.

My response:
I have never worked with DirectShow. But whatever little i know about Direct Show is that its API is COM based and primarily accessible through C++. C# can support COM based APIs through a concept called CCW (COM Callable Wrappers). But with CCW there is a cost associated with marshalling the calls b/w COM and .NET objects, so native C++ will always be faster in this case. You can use managed C++ for that as well.

Object Relational Mapping

Some one asked me on my mail recently:

Hi hope you are fine my question is

I can make a realationship between a query of a particular table to a particular object..
For example I have two table Customer and Order
SAy For Customer table i can make a Customer class.(select * from cutomer)
And can have one to one relationship between table(datareader) fields and object properties.
SAy For Orders i can make a Order class.(select * from order)
And can have one to one relationship between table(datareader) fields and object properties.

But what can i do if i have a query with multiple tables.that is with customer and orders in the query that is
select c.cutomername,c.cutomerid,c.address,o.date,o.isdelivered from order o,cutomer c where c.customerid=o.cutomerid.

Now in which object should i fill values from reader.
(if used both cutomer and order object then how to use them and How to relate them)

My response was:

There are multiple ways with which you could handle your scenario. These are typical obection relational mapping issues. But before i tell you any thing concrete i would suggest you to throughly study " Designing Data Tier Components and Passing Data Through Tiers" at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/BOAGag.asp

Now coming towards a solution, you can create a Customer Entity that maps to customer table in your relational data store and you can also create Orders entity that again maps to your Orders table in your database. And then since i believe one customer is supposed to have zero or more orders then you can keep a collection of Orders entity in your Cutsomer entity. That is you create first a customer enity through iterating your reader and then create Order entities and putting them in Order Collection inside your customer entity.

Yours is a very typical scenario, there are far more complex situations one could face with Object Relational mapping. I will also suggest you to take a look at tools like IBatis( http://ibatis.apache.org/) and NHibernate(http://www.hibernate.org/343.html).